The writer who knew too much

Of all the reactions to the character and work of Thomas Pynchon, the strangest resistance is to see the obvious: that his literary career is a paradigm of the relationship between author, text, context and reader. There, namely, the critical postulates that both the author and the context emerge from the text and not the other way around, that these hermeneutic operations are the responsibility of the readers, who are therefore responsible for the meanings they read, are factually proven. And with regard to more abstract problems such as the relationship between the plot and the characters or the narration and the narrated, Pynchon's narrative constructions concretely push under the readers' noses the obvious truth that both characters and themes are the result and not the origin of shaping procedures. Of all things, it seems that the realization that ambiguity is not the result of a lack but of an abundance of data, and that every interpretation is a function of the criteria for distinguishing the important from the unimportant, seems to fall the hardest.

"It's happened before, but now there's nothing to compare it to." The second sentence of Pynchon's first magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) – from now on, thanks to Nina Muzhdeka, as Gravity rainbow available to the local readership - certainly best sums up the effect of reading Pynchon, while the experience itself is described on the next page: "No, this is not a twist from, but a progressive entanglement in -." Who exactly gets involved in what is not said, but there is no doubt that it heralds a terribly demanding and hilariously entertaining process of navigating an extraordinary range of styles and registers, from pornography and behavioral psychology and quantum mechanics to scatology, psychoanalysis and mathematics, and countless literary, historical, technological, mythological and all kinds of other references and allusions. With corresponding amplitudes, each of Pynchon's eight novels – of which they are still untranslated Vineland (1990) Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006).

As an example of Pynchon's strategy of manipulating the interpretive perspective, we can mention that the phrase from the title of his last novel for now - bleeding edge - in barely a dozen years since the date of publication (2013), it has gone from a phrase used by those in the know to call the most advanced technological advances, and consequently high-risk investment opportunities, to a relatively obscure expression, so linked to a specific period that it is immediately recognized, as it were, by itself. those who used it then. One of them, Andrew Leonard, recalls reading a novel about the subject he dealt with in the late 1990s in his online column, called The Bleeding Edge, approached with a lot of skepticism about the competence of the author, then already in retirement age. Characteristically, after reading it, he concluded that Pynchon knew - and too much.

If this is so in relation to the past period, the degree of awareness of the epochs about which professional studies and all kinds of trivializations are at his disposal can only be higher. In this regard, it will be interesting for readers from the wider local area that in the most extensive and in terms of following the plot, the most complex, although due to the mostly linear presentation, perhaps the simplest in terms of plot, the novel Against the Day, among all the force of characters you can find Vlado, Zlatko, Danilo, Batko and Vesna, and in many localities Pula, Metković, Pljevlja, Kosovska Mitrovica and Demir Kapija, and that, apart from the reason why the uskos are mentioned, Tesla, Goce Delčev , VMRO and Crna ruka, the terms appear in their original form sorry i hvala, including sinew, pancake or sage, and "Montenegro joke" I'm fucking your father. The fact that, in the branch of the plot concerning the Annexation crisis, which will introduce a gamut of geopolitical tensions, "in three quarters of a beat, into a general European war", certain attention is also paid to the Novopazar sandjak, for the readers Long gravity it will not be a surprise because at the beginning of that novel in one of Pynchon's typical poems it is said about him: "Nobody knows where-on-the-map-it is, | Who would have said that everything comes from him?"

The conclusion from the beginning might be less strange if they take into account that the key to a more natural reading of Pynchon is that what is not hidden at all is the least visible and that the greatest danger threatens from what is so well known that it is unknown. Literally the first thing you read after the title and dedication Long gravity, a novel that largely follows the parable of rocket technology, is the epigraph "Everything that science has taught me, and continues to teach me, only strengthens my faith in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death," signed by the designer of the Nazi V2 missiles and a key figure in the US space program . Asked who he was referring to in his famous speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex when he said that the US government was being held hostage by the scientific and technological elite, Eisenhower mentioned two names, one of which was Werner von Braun. Who a year later would publish the quoted pamphlet about his belief in immortality.